Higher Education Webinars

Mama PhD

At a recent birthday party one of my daughter’s friends received a copy of the young readers edition of the book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan. The dust jacket describes the book as “an unforgettable journey behind the scenes of your dinner”. My daughter was intrigued. It is a very readable narrative, and since she found it in the library a last week, she has carried it around constantly.

In response to last week’s post, Suzanne Sheffield commented, “Your story reiterates what I often think - as parents we should listen to that quiet but persistent inner voice that tells us that something is wrong and we SHOULD be worried.”

When I was a child, there was a commercial on (black and white) TV that had a very happy woman telling a friend about some beauty product, and then that friend told several friends about it, "and so on, and so on, and so on." The way news of this beauty product was spread mimics exponential growth, where the number of people told is raised to a power with each telling. I could not help but think of such growth when I learned recently of the death of one of my colleagues from our Department of Education.

My six-year-old daughter likes to dance around the living room with a pink Barbie microphone pretending to be Sharpay from High School Musical. She leaps from one couch to another, gesturing wildly and imitating the teenage girls she watches in movies and videos. When she catches me looking at her from the other room, she imperiously orders me to leave; these personas are her private creations. I love her physical confidence, her swagger, and her joy in singing.

Sometimes it seems like the first days of school go on and on. Last week was the official first day of school, but only for an hour and not for my kindergartener. She dressed up anyway to celebrate her brother’s first day. Her first "day" in the classroom was a twenty-minute parent-child meeting with the teacher. And nearly a week after everyone else started school, the kindergarteners spent two one-hour mornings in the classroom before finally attending for the full three hours.

Over the 15 years that we’ve had children in school, my husband and I have managed not to have latch-key kids. Until now. For years, one or the other of us could be at home in the afternoon when they got home. Sometimes that meant picking them up from school and bringing them up to campus while I finished the work day, sometimes it meant finishing the work day at home, but one way or another we managed.

As I work proofs with my Calculus and Higher Geometries students, I often run across the Greek symbol that, in math, means “there exists." This might show up, for example, in statements such as “there exists” a point, a line or, (in economics) an equilibrium. Such existential issues are not foreign to mathematics, as arguably the most famous existential statement, “I think, therefore I am”, was made by Rene Descartes, who also gave us the “Cartesian Plane”, the intersection of the X and Y axes that becomes the canvas on which we draw analytic geometry.

September 6th was the 150th birthday of writer, philosopher and political activist Jane Addams --the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the founder of Chicago’s Hull House. I decided to require my honors students to meet me for class this week at the Hull House museum, where a block party birthday celebration was planned for the community (with free food...).